With
the advent of FaceBook and Smart Phones, I no longer
take pictures so I'm archiving 3 decades of throw
backs pictures that were taken for my website Guy's
Gallery on FaceBook for public viewing of the people
in the Houston Community. Take a walk down memory
lane. Click the picture below to see pictures you
don't have to be a member of FaceBook to view. Enjoy!

Candidates vie for District K
Council seat

The race is on for the District K
City Council seat formerly held by the late Councilman Larry
Green. Nine candidates are running in the special election,
which will be held on Saturday, May 5. The term runs through
2019.

Larry Blackmonis a
retired educator. He is an appointee to HISD’s Project
Advisory Board, overseeing bonds for construction of the new
Yates High School, and an active member of the Yates Alumni
Association. He sponsored the Mayor’s Youth Council from
1994 to 2006.

Martha Castex-Tatumis
director of Constituent Services for District K and has
advocated for seniors, small business owners, youth,
economic development and beautification. She was the first
African-American woman elected to the San Marcos City
Council and served as deputy mayor pro tempore.

Carl David Evans is an
associate with White-Orugboh and Associates Certified
Public Accountants and a licensed minister. He has twice
been elected president of the Fort Bend Houston Super
Neighborhood Council 41 and designated representative
for the Chasewood Community Improvement Association.

Patricia “Pat” Frazier has
served as a District K educator and member of Mayor
Sylvester Turner’s transition team. Her involvement
includes Southeast Precinct Judges Council, Harris
County precinct chair and judge, Senate District 13
executive secretary, and Houston Black American
Democrats member.

Anthony Freddie is a
former City of Houston employee. He was assistant to Mayor
Lee P. Brown’s chief of staff and chair of the Super
Neighborhood Alliance. He served as assistant to the airport
manager and with the Houston Police Department. His
involvement includes Northeast YMCA and NAACP.

Elisabeth Johnson is a
Texas Southern University graduate student and author of
“Wake Up: A Despairing Cry to the Black Community.” She
is a Houston Black American Democrats board member and
Houston Justice Coalition vice president. She worked on Bill
White’s gubernatorial campaign.

Lawrence McGaffie is an
Army veteran and ordained minister who has served as an
associate/outreach minister and youth leader. He served as
director of community engagement for the MLK Association of
Houston. He founded Inspire the Lead and is a volunteer
with God’s Food Pantry.

Aisha Savoy is employed
with the City of Houston Office of the City Engineer,
Floodplain Management Office. She served as a staff member
for former Councilmember Sue Lovell. She has worked with
victims of Hurricanes Katrina, Ike, Rita, Harvey and other
disasters.

Gerry Vander-Lyn has
worked in various capacities in multiple sectors including
social services, finance, and non-profits. She said she has
never run for public office before now, choosing instead to
support others in that endeavor. (She did not provide a
photo).

District K Special Election

Saturday, May 5

No bond for Houston teen charged
with 8-year-old’s shooting death

The man accused of killing an 8-year-old
in Houston has been denied bond.

Witnesses told police that they saw
Lockett shooting from the passenger seat of a vehicle in the 3900
block of Scott Street, where Hutchins and his 5-year-old
sister were sitting in a Nissan Versa, according to court
records. Hutchins’ sister was also struck in the leg.

In the weeks after – and as Hutchins
remained hospitalized in critical condition – city
and community leaders pleaded for witnesses to come forward
and for the city to unite to stem the gun violence that has killed
11 children in the city since December 2016.

Diamond and Silk criticize Michelle
Obama for comparing Trump to a ‘Negligent Parent’

8

Michelle Obama spoke at the Simmons
Leadership Conference in Boston when she compared her
husband’s presidency to President Donald Trump’s.

“I think what we see is what happens
when we take things for granted. For the eight years
Barack was president, it was like having the ‘good
parent’ at home. The responsible parent, the one who
told you to eat your carrots and go to bed on time,”
Michelle said using a metaphor to explain Barack Obama and
the American people.

Then she compared the relationship
between Trump and the American people as the opposite.
“And now we have the other parent. We thought it’d
feel fun, maybe it feels fun for now because we can eat
candy all day and stay up late, and not follow the
rules.”

Commentators and known Trump supporters
Diamond and Silk didn’t take to kindly to the comments.
The duo attacked the former first lady’s parenting
skills. Diamond said, “Let’s look at Obama’s
parenting, he fed us so much sugar honey ice tea (sh*t),
that the American people started to walk around
constipated.” Silk chimed in, “If Michelle Obama want
to talk about parenting, talk about how she let her oldest
daughter intern for Harvey Weinstein.” She then said,
“Her mother intuition should have let her know that
something wasn’t right”

BET Founder falsely credits Trump
for lowering Black unemployment

Robert Johnson, the founder of BET and the
nation’s first Black billionaire, gave Trump supporters
something to crow about after he incorrectly credited the
president for improving the job outlook for
African-Americans.

“When you look at African-American
unemployment, in over 50 years since the Bureau of Labor
Statistics has been keeping the numbers, you’ve never had
two things: African-American unemployment this low and the
spread between unemployment among whites and
African-Americans narrowing,” Johnson said Friday on
CNBC’s Squawk Box.

That comment pleased President Donald
Trump and warmed the hearts of right-wing conservative
media. Outlets like Breitbart joyfully shared the
Johnson’s remarks.

The BET founder, however, failed to note
that the Black unemployment rate had declined steadily
during President Barack Obama’s presidency. Indeed,
economists have credited Obama’s financial recovery
initiative from the historic recession for the declining
unemployment.

In 2010 during the recession, the Black
unemployment rate hit 16.8 percent, but it has continued to
decrease falling to 7.8 percent when Trump took office.
Johnson cited the December jobs report showing that
unemployment among Black workers was at its lowest since the
Labor Department began tracking the data in 1972. It fell to
6.9 percent, but it remains nearly double the white
unemployment rate of 3.6 percent.

Johnson met with Trump in the weeks after
the 2016 election when he was parading high-profile
individuals under consideration for cabinet posts in front
the media at his golf club in New Jersey. After that
meeting, he urged African Americans to have an open mind
about Trump.

Anthony Graves spent 12 years on death row
before a conservative federal court tossed out his wrongful
capital murder conviction. Texas courts had previously
rejected all of his appeals.

“I had to get out of the state of Texas
and into the federal court system to get help,” he told
The Texas Tribune Friday. “If it was up to the state
itself, I would have been executed.”

It’s a point he made in arguing against
a pending request by the state to speed up the federal
appeals process in death penalty cases. He’s not alone:
Several lawyers, former judges and legal groups have asked
the federal government to deny the request by bringing up
the cases of people, like Graves, who were taken off death
row long after their sentences were handed down.

As first reported by the Houston
Chronicle, Texas is currently awaiting a decision from
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on whether its state
appellate system is competent enough to limit death row
appeals in federal court. If approved, the time frame
for inmate attorneys to file petitions in federal court
after state appeals would be cut in half, the courts would
have deadlines on when to rule on the cases, and the scope
of claims that could be considered would be further
restricted.

The request was originally made in
2013 under Republican Gov. Greg
Abbottwhen he was the state’s attorney general, but
it was tabled by the Obama administration. Then in
November, the Sessions-led Department of Justice notified
Texas it would begin reviewing the petition for faster
appeals and asked for updated information.

“Opting-in would serve several purposes
for Texans, including sparing crime victims years of
unnecessary, stressful delays, ensuring that our state court
judgments are respected by federal judges as cases progress,
and reducing the excessive costs of lengthy federal court
proceedings,” said AG spokeswoman Kayleigh Lovvorn in a
statement earlier this week.

Federal law says that the nation’s top
prosecutor can allow a state to opt in for these greater
restrictions in federal appeals if it appoints competent
representation for poor capital defendants in
post-conviction appeals at the state level. So far, no
state has been certified, though Arizona’s petition is
also currently being reviewed, according to the Department
of Justice. In February, a capital defense group and
several death row inmates filed a federal lawsuit
challenging the lawfulness of the certification process.

Texas said in a December letter to the
department it does have a competent state appellate system
in place, but public comments from different groups involved
in the capital punishment process argued otherwise. Graves
and others have pointed to his case as an example of how the
state often get its wrong, arguing that the safeguard of the
federal reviews can be lifesaving.

“Despite the fact that Mr. Graves was
represented by attorneys deemed competent under Texas law at
every stage of the proceeding, it took twelve years of
sustained litigation for his legitimate constitutional
claims — and his innocence — to be discovered,
presented, and acknowledged, and for relief to be
granted,” wrote Bryce Benjet, an attorney for the
Innocence Project, in a statement asking the government to
deny Texas’ petition.

A former U.S. district judge from Texas’
eastern district, Leonard Davis, also asked for the
government to deny Texas’ request in a public comment.
Davis, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said
death-sentenced prisoners in Texas often miss out on full
and fair consideration of their constitutional challenges
because of inadequate legal representation in state appeals.

He wrote of Christopher Wayne Shuffield, a
former death row inmate whose lawyer in state appeals failed
to investigate a challenge to his future dangerousness. His
federal appellate lawyer was able to bring up the claim, and
Shuffield’s sentence was changed after Davis ruled on the
case, he said. Davis said he’s concerned that if Texas is
approved for the stricter federal guidelines, the case would
have gone the other way.

“I am also concerned that Texas will
continue to fall short in its efforts to guarantee state
habeas counsel that will timely investigate and present all
viable constitutional challenges to their clients’ capital convictions
and death sentences,” Davis wrote. “It would be a
travesty of justice if Mr. Shuffield had been executed on
the basis of false evidence that he was a violent man in
jail.”

The high profile case of Duane
Buck was also mentioned in a statement filed by the
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Buck, a black man
who had an expert witness testify at his trial that his race
made him more likely to be a future danger, was re-sentenced
to life in prison last year in Harris County after the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that Buck had incompetent counsel for
allowing the testimony. Buck’s appeals had lost in state
courts.

Meanwhile, Graves has been a free man for
more than seven years now. He was eventually exonerated of
the murders that landed him on death row, but he said Friday
the newly revived petition is a slap in the face, and, since
the state has asked for its approval to be applied
retroactively to 1995, affects many death row inmates
currently in appeals.

“There are literally innocent people
shaking in their boots at the thought that they’re going
to speed up their appeals process,” he said. “If this
was in place when I was on death row, I would have been
executed.”

The
PINNACLE Center is free* for use to Fort Bend and City
of Houston residents that are ages 50 and above.